The 21st Century Blues

By Kenny Ausubel, AlterNet. Posted January 9, 2003.

I've got the 21st Century Blues.

Amid rumors of war, threats of terrorist attacks using weapons of mass destruction stalk our national security. But in fact, perhaps the greatest security menace over the coming years is going to be the deteriorating environment. Or so say CIA analysts.

They warn that the wars of the future -- the near future -- will be fought over water, not oil. Water tables are sinking faster than the stock market, and unlike oil, there's no substitute for water. They caution against the global pandemic of AIDS and other deadly infectious diseases. They see tidal waves of desperate environmental refugees on the horizon. They anticipate widespread political destabilization and cascading financial crises.

The skid marks of industrial civilization are everywhere to be seen. Let's take the scenic route.

These are biblical times indeed, but it's no longer a miracle to walk on the water of the Sea of Galilee. Its level has dropped to the lowest ever recorded. Over in Mexico City, a plummeting aquifer is making the famed National Cathedral "bend and droop like a reflection in a funhouse mirror."

Which might remind locals up in Alaska of their "drunken trees" sagging into the once-upon-a-permafrost. Alaska got ahead of the global warming curve. Roads are buckling. Rupturing sewage lines are spawning a return to the old reliable outhouse. But even citizens grateful for those oil royalties are speechless at the death of four million acres of spruce forest, the biggest loss ever of trees to insects in North America. Nobody much wants to talk about the thawing tundra beneath the 800-mile Trans-Alaska pipeline either.

2001 was the second hottest year in 140 years of record-keeping, which might help explain why they were mowing the grass in December at the NY Botanical Garden, or those massive multi-billion-dollar floods raging across Europe. Moaned one of Prague's 50,000 evacuees, "We were prepared for a hundred-year flood, but this was a thousand-year flood." Then again, those epic forest fires sure coulda used some of that rain in the 29 US states strangled by long-term drought.

Even Rip Van Bush's EPA woke up to smell the climate change. Yup, it's for real and it's caused by fossil fuels. But hey, now that we've waited so long, there's nothing to do about it. It's inevitable; get used to it, and say adios to Rocky Mountain meadows and coral reefs. This is about economic growth.

Of course the insurance industry isn't buying it. The global giant Munich Re sets the price tag for global warming at $300 billion a year down the pike.

But for now the climate suits West Nile virus just fine. In the blink of an eye, it hitched a ride with mosquitoes up to the Northern Hemisphere and clear across the country. So we sprayed the little suckers good. Problem is, when researchers did an autopsy of dead birds in New York, they found lots more birds dying from pesticides than the virus.

And now it turns out global warming is going to blow out the ozone hole all over again, just when we thought we had it licked. Those UV rays are already mutating nasty new viruses we've never seen before; they're feeding on all that sewage and farm runoff in those algal blooms off the coasts.

But I dare you to prove the connection, because then there's also the 26 million pounds of antibiotics washing off those factory farms.

Let's not jump to conclusions. The first-ever government report on drugs in the water says those antibiotics are competing for ecological shelf space with prodigious amounts of hormones. Could be that $2.7 billion estrogen-replacement industry too. But then there's all the other meds -- anti-cholesterol, antidepressants, chemotherapy, Viagra, and caffeine (lots of caffeine) -- that are showing up in 80 percent of US streams.

Maybe this pharmaceutical pollution has something to do with all those intersex fish. Seems to be feminizing them, and I don't mean that in a Robert Bly kind of way. Alligators with shrinking penises, sperm counts dropping 50 percent, four in 10 men at risk from a new syndrome called Testicular Dysgenesis.

Same deal in water taps from the bayou to Berlin. Pretty soon those number-crunching drug companies will be inserting special charges in your water bill.

Which doesn't sound all that outlandish if you're Percy Schmeiser, the Canadian farmer who got busted by Monsanto for illegally growing its genetically engineered canola without a license. The thing is -- he didn't plant it. Must've volunteered when some seed fell off a farmer's truck, or pollen drifted over and contaminated his fields. Monsanto won the first two rounds in court, so now it's suing farmers across the Midwest and Canada after this toxic trespassing enlarged its failing market.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »